A counterfactual, with help from David Crystal History gave English two invasions in the wrong order for a tidy thought experiment, so it’s worth doing the untidy version. In 1066, French-speaking Normans conquered an England that had already spent two centuries absorbing Norse-speaking Danes. What if the order had been reversed: Normans first, Danes two […]
What If the Normans Had Come First? Read More »
On the odd position of medical students trained in English, treating patients in something else entirely There’s a specific kind of two-language problem that shows up in medical schools across Italy, Poland, Hungary, and a handful of other countries: international students recruited into English-taught medicine programmes, trained entirely in English, examined in English, then sent
When the Classroom Language Isn’t the Ward Language Read More »
Or: why native-speaker communication advice only tells half the story There’s plenty of generic advice out there on conversation mistakes: interrupting, talking too much about yourself, asking only closed-ended questions. Most of it applies equally to native speakers. But for C1+ learners, several of these same mistakes have a second cause hiding underneath the obvious
10 Conversation Mistakes That Get Worse in a Second Language Read More »
Or: why more words is the wrong prescription There’s a specific kind of stuck that C1 students hit, and it’s not really a vocabulary problem, even though it presents as one. They know the word. They can define it, translate it, use it correctly in a gap-fill exercise. And then they open their mouth in
What Lateral Thinking Has to Do With a C1 Vocabulary Plateau Read More »
Or: the phrases that make a meeting sound like a different language entirely Business English has its own idiom set, and it trips up C1+ students in a specific way: you know every word individually and still have no idea what’s being proposed. Getting these right is less about sounding native and more about not
Mastering the Language of Commerce: British Business Idioms Read More »
Or: what actually makes a student stay past the trial lesson Rapport over a webcam is a genuinely different problem from rapport in a room. You lose the physical cues that normally do half the work, no shared space, no incidental chat before class starts, no body language beyond a face in a small rectangle.
Building Rapport with Online ESL Students Read More »
Or: what online lessons actually get you that a textbook doesn’t Online English teaching isn’t really about convenience, though it does offer that: no commute, no fixed classroom, lessons that fit around a working life instead of the other way round. The actual case for it is narrower and more useful: a good online tutor
Boost Your English Skills with Expert Online Teaching Read More »
Or: which actually gets you the score At C1+, TOEFL prep isn’t about learning English anymore; it’s about learning the test. That distinction changes the group-vs-one-on-one question, because what you’re optimising for is targeted correction, not general exposure. Group classes are cheaper and give you something one-on-one can’t: other accents, other mistakes to learn from,
Cracking the TOEFL Code: Group vs. One-on-One Lessons Read More »
Or: why spaced repetition works and which tool to actually use If you’ve ever memorised a word list the night before a lesson and lost half of it by the following week, that’s not a discipline problem; it’s the forgetting curve, first documented by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. New information decays fast unless you review
Master Your Cambridge C1 Advanced Vocabulary Read More »
Or: what to actually check before you pay for a teacher Anyone can put ‘English teacher’ on a profile. The online market makes this worse, not better: no shared classroom, no colleague down the corridor who’d notice if someone was winging it, just a webcam and a price per hour. If you’re C1+ and serious
Mastering Your Online English Learning Read More »
